TRAVR Training Ops Art Pipeline

Hello everyone and welcome to the thread. My name's Nick and I'm the primary artist on the content development team here at Virtuix. I wanted to give you all a glimpse into the pipeline we're using to create 3D content. Consider this an overview of a step-by-step process for creating a 3D asset to be used in Training Ops. As I make progress on some of these assets, I'll be updating this thread with images and descriptions of what it is I'm working on and what kinds of techniques I'm using (apologies in advance if some of the terminology gets technical). If you have any questions on software, technique, workflow or just want to give some feedback, feel free to ask and I'll field your question as soon as I'm able. :]

Let's get to it!

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The last month or so, I've been working on updating the modular assets our level designers are using to build out each round (I'll give you a breakdown of those assets at a later date). With those assets integrated into the game, I've started to work on updating the turret(s) we're using throughout the rounds. The design for these are more-or-less finished and with the game resolution models completed, I'll be moving onto creating a high resolution asset that I'll use to transfer secondary and tertiary details. For those wondering, I use Maya for the majority of my hard-surface modeling.

@KellCam_Virtuix@xxann5 American Gladiators was actually used as reference for the old turret design. Since the speed at which the bullets were being shot is closer to that of a tennis ball shooter, I thought it would be fitting. I'm a bit defensive of my old design (which was done in about 2 hours for the record) but even I think that the new turrets by @kippernicus look much much better. Haha That's why he's the artist. Maybe the old design will show up again if we decide to do an American Gladiators themed version of Training Ops. (That's a joke, don't get your hopes up. haha)

Thanks for the comments everyone. sutekiB: I can't really comment as to whether or not the original turret design will be present in the final version, since we're still in mid-development. I agree though; it does look pretty cool. Hopefully you'll like the final versions more. It's funny y'all mention American Gladiator: we actually talked about that a lot when we started to iterate on the prototype of Training Ops.

Here's another update on those turrets. The first iteration of the flamethrower and gun turrets are complete. I'll give a quick breakdown of the whole process after the initial models were built:Once the game resolution models were finished, I moved onto creating the high resolution models that I used for normal map and color baking purposes. You can see in the images below how I used the geometry itself to denote different areas for materials, instead of painting the colors in. This isn't always the best way to go about baking out a color map, but for the style we're going for, using the geometry was sufficient enough.From there, I took those models into Substance Painter, where I baked out the base maps (ID, Tnormal, AO, curv and Wnormal) and started to mess around with different materials. Once I was happy with the overall look of the materials, I exported the maps and brought everything into Unity to do a final test on the materials and make sure everything looks good in different types of lighting.And there you have it! There's still a bit more work to be done on the turrets, including their animations and finishing the base that they sit on, but from a visual standpoint, they're good to go for now. Let me know what you think!